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On store finders

As well as the usual info on opening hours and location, Schuh has added customer reviews of each store to its store finder.

Whether this helps conversion here is debatable, but I’d imagine it helps to keep staff on their toes.

In Google local search results

Schuh again, and this time reviews of its stores are likely to help increase footfall.

Using Google+ Local should be a no-brainer for businesses with an offline presence as it offers greater search visibility and the opportunity to advertise to local searchers at no cost.

Here, the reviews are generally positive and should help persuade people to make the journey to the store.

Also, these results appear in non-brand search results for local searchers for terms like ‘shoe shops’.

In filtered navigation

Consumer reviews on ecommerce sites shouldn’t just be confined to product pages.

Instead, think about how you can use them to send people to product pages, or to help their product selection.

Here on Best Buy. users can select average review scores as a filter alongside other product features.

In PPC ads

Seller ratings provided by customers can be used in PPC ads to provide a quick star rating for searchers.

Here, confused.com’s ratings give it a slight edge over the rest, top position aside.

In marketing emails

Reviews can be used to determine which products customers really appreciate and to promote them.

In this example, Oliver Bonas displays three of its top reviewed products:

Here’s another example from Sony France:

Used with apps in-store

Italian retailer Marcopolo has an app which has been designed for in-store use.

As retailers look to combat showrooming, making reviews easy to find for in-store shoppers is a very smart idea.

Here, customers can scan QR codes (yes, a good use of QR) on the shopfloor to be shown reviews and other product information.

As retailers look to combat showrooming, making reviews easy to find for in-store shoppers is a very smart idea. This means customers don’t need to search elsewhere for this information, including on competitors’ sites.

Add to organic results

If you have reviews on site, this is an easy win. Here, both moneysupermarket and LV use Schema markup to show average review scores in the search results.

Gocompare may have pipped them to the top organic slot, but these two results stand out more thanks to the star ratings.

Brochures

Why not? Social proof can work offline just as well as online. Here’s an example from Currys’ brochure.

At the store shelf

While it’s good to provide mobile users with easy access to reviews vis in-store prompts, there is a case for cutting out the middle man and just showing reviews on the shelf.

Recommended

After years of studying the online purchasing journey, I have a theory that when making an important purchase shoppers draw up a shortlist of four desirable items and/or four retailers to buy them from.

In her book, The Art of Choosing, Professor Lyengar reveals that too much choice renders us overwhelmed to the point of indecision – so it makes sense that we would limit our choices in order to make the decision process simpler for ourselves.

Think about the last time you made a considered purchase, such as a car, new phone or mortgage. How many different items and retailers made your shortlist?

Western ecommerce brands seeking to expand into China cannot ignore the 500lb gorilla that is Tmall.

Even ASOS was recently forced to admit that its best chance of cracking China was to establish a presence on Tmall, while Burberry became the latest UK fashion brand to open a Tmall storefront in April.

In fact the Alibaba-owned marketplace currently has around 2,000 foreign brands among its 70,000 sellers.

So what’s so important about Tmall that it can make the likes of Apple, Uniqlo, Reebok, and ASOS create a store within someone else’s domain rather than rely on their own website?

The B2C marketplace was spun out of Taobao in 2010, which is itself a C2C marketplace that’s similar to eBay. Tmall allows brands and retailers to establish a digital storefront, which is again similar to the new model offered by eBay.

May 7th 201417:34

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